All posts tagged: coffee roasting

The fundamentals of brewing coffee are straight forward. We complicate things a little too much sometimes. Keep the following things in mind and you’re on your way to a great brew. Water is a big factor… Water represents around 90 percent of your brew. In fact, you’re drinking delicious flavoured water. I don’t want to get too geeky and explain water chemistry, but to create the perfect cup, your water needs to be the best it can be. First, if the water doesn’t taste right, don’t use it. It’s pretty simple. As a rule, bottled spring water or a good filtration system are your best bets. I use filtered water from my Brita filter jug. Brita filters are an easy and cheap way to get great quality water both for brewing coffee and drinking. I did an experiment comparing Melbourne tap water to tap water filtered through my Brita filter jug. The results where based on taste. The Brita filter produced a sweeter and more acidic cup. Second, for most brewing methods, I recommend heating your water to …

One of my fondest childhood memories is my mom baking bread. Today, butter melting on a thick, warm slice of freshly baked bread still tastes like my childhood. Growing up in a family of six like mine, that freshly baked goodness never made it to Day 2. It didn’t even make it to the 8 ‘o clock news. For the purpose of this post though, let’s pretend it did. Let’s imagine my sisters and I were able to exercise some self-control. Let’s imagine we let the bread just stand there. For days. It would, of course, get stale. Because of the exposure to air. To oxygen, more specifically. Same goes for coffee. As soon as coffee beans are roasted, they start to lose their freshness. Because of the exposure to air. To oxygen, more specifically. The longer that exposure, the more freshness is lost. So the key to the freshest cup of coffee possible is quite simple actually: buy coffee as close to the roast date as possible. Coffee geeks globally recommend you’ll get the best results by consuming within …

Trust me, I know how difficult it is to get into coffee. I remember the first time I had a proper chat with a barista. He had just served me a flat white. It looked like a cappuccino to me but I wasn’t in the mood for an argument. Instead I did the slow nod of appreciation. He began to explain that they were serving a Guatemalan that day. I had a quick look around but didn’t notice anyone interesting. He carried on to say that he was excited for me to taste it as it was a “complex coffee with hints of cocoa.” I nodded some more. I was still nodding when I realized he had stopped talking and was waiting for me to take my first sip. While I sipped he added that coffee generally is amazing. That while wine has about 750 “taste profiles”, coffee has more than 1500! Then he paused his excitement and asked: “So what do you think?” I assumed he wanted to me to distinguish which of the 1500 …